“I wonder if it is almost spring?” thought Rondah, looking up at the amber cliffs half-covered with diamond-leaved forests. “I wonder if it is almost spring?” and she looked longingly away at the one rift in the burning garnet walls, where beyond them she could see the purple sea and reddish froth. No more was it cold, icy and dark.
For a moment, with its old, terrible intensity, her heart woke to its misery, but only to still heavily again.
A step sounded on the soft leaves beside her.
“Regan!” she cried, gladly, and sprang to her feet.
No, no; it was that stranger, emerald and glistening and of angelic countenance.
“Is it spring now?” asked Rondah, without preliminary. Perhaps he had come to take her home!
“It is winter, drear, dead, white winter. No one has awakened yet.”
“Have you seen him?”
“Whom?”
“Regan!”